You know Internet dating's become totally mainstream when Disney cranks out a bland comedy featuring a randomly selected pair of mismatched stars to take on the subject. Bearing the unwieldy and meaningless title Bringing Down the House, said comedy is predicated on the biggest pitfall of cyber-flirting, the idea that...
It's usually right about this time of year that film critics, especially those of advancing years, begin to feel a slow chill of dread creep up their spines. Suppressing that urge, they generally find it quickly replaced by a sudden rush of sneering condescension and smug mock-martyrdom. "Oh no!" they...
Rob Evans faces his basketball team in the locker room at Wells Fargo Arena. It's mid-November, 10 days until opening night, and Arizona State University has just finished a dress rehearsal for the 2002-2003 season, an intersquad contest in which the prospective starters got thumped by the second team. The...
March 21, 2003though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan's West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could findit looked like a...
Dark Blue, according to its credits, is based upon a story by Los Angeles-born author James Ellroy, who pens grisly and guilt-ridden pulp-noir haiku that spread across hundreds of pages. Its screenplay was penned by copper caper fetishist David Ayer, a native Angelino with an affinity for Hollywood-dark stories that...
These are the dog days of January, the poor, put-upon month used by studios as a dumping ground for product considered too lethally toxic for release during those real moviegoing months December, say, when audiences are buzzed on two weeks of vacation and award-contenders do their Oscar striptease and reveal...
For the first time in my life, I'm wishing that I adored baseball. Specifically, baseball as played by two teams: the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Mariners. Because then I could be as excited as the rest of the world seems to be over the new, improved northwest Valley,...
Francis Ford Coppola dreamed of doing an accurate Pinocchio film, but legal battles took that away from him. Walt Disney's version is a classic, but omits a huge amount of material from the original book and Disneyfies what remains. And others have tried, over the years, though it's best to...
It all begins with the word. "I believe I may have a first sentence," murmurs Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman yes, really) to her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), commencing labor on her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The year is 1921, but skillfully intercut segments illustrate that the book's heady emotional content...
Four of the top 10 films I saw this past year don't actually open in the U.S. until 2003, but they played at various film festivals during the year. By listing them here I not only alert readers to films they should watch out for in '03, but I also...
Of all the movies you could be spending your December with -- and there are many good choices, from Oscar-bait to better-than-expected sequels like Santa Clause 2 -- why would you want to end up at Drumline? "Hey, dear, wanna go see the new Scorsese flick, or maybe one of...
In all, a far better year than any in recent memory, so much so that it feels impolite and irresponsible to choose a mere 10 best among the annum's offerings. This list remained in flux 'til the last possible moment; five seconds ago it featured, among others, Signs, Full Frontal,...
The Year of Living Dangerously Cinema 2002 counterbalanced a treacherous world. In order to distill the essence of a year in cinema, one must first appraise the year itself. In a word, 2002 was about strife. Why? Mainly because some of our leaders are stupid and/or insane. (We've all been...
Let's start this movie year off right. Let's talk about women. In film, that is. Oftentimes, women in film act a lot like men in film. (Behold, an almost complete history of men in film, condensed into six words: talking smack and/or cracking skulls.) Of late, however, it has come...
It's one day before Arizona State University's first official practice of the 2002-03 season. The basketball staff meets at Rob and Carolyn Evans' beautiful Ahwatukee home at 8 a.m. to discuss the upcoming season. The gathering includes the three assistant coaches Russ Pennell, Tony Benford and Dan O'Dowd. Derrick Wrobel...
It's never a good sign when somewhere in the vicinity of half of my most memorable moviegoing experiences in a given year come from reissues of films at least three decades old. But there it is: In my memory banks, 2002 may well be remembered as the year of the...
With Frida -- the story of profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican-Jewish painter Frida Kahlo -- it's evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it'll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that's the first and last cynical comment of...
As you enter the backdoor entrance of Durant's restaurant in Phoenix, you cannot help but notice the hardworking cooks trying to hide their sweat and fatigue while giving you a friendly smile and muffled hello in broken English. The Valley's kitchens are full of these men and women in white...
Thespians, take note: Barbara Harris has moved to town, and she's hung up her teaching shingle. Local acting students could do worse; Harris' brief but notable Broadway career snagged her a Tony Award for The Apple Tree in 1967, and she was nominated for her role in On a Clear...
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I've seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki's animated spectacular (and Japan's highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions -- one in...
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion -- as well as the plight of the pretty boy -- to become one of contemporary cinema's more vital actors. In The Four Feathers -- as in The Patriot, A Knight's Tale...
In The Banger Sisters, Goldie Hawn plays Suzette, an aging groupie too stuck in a gloriously seedy past to move into the future. It's 2002, yet she acts as though it's 1969 and nothing's changed -- not the Sunset Strip's Whisky A Go-Go, where she still tends bar behind sunglasses...
